Detention
The Failings of Family Detention at Artesia
The inhumanity of family detention and the danger of short-changing basic due process protections are on full display in the detention center in Artesia, New Mexico, where hundreds of women and children are being held by the U.S. government. The Washington Post reports this week on a tour they took… Read More
Immigration Bar Urges Congress, President to Shut Down Family Detention Center in Artesia
This week, the nation’s largest association of immigration attorneys and professors sent a powerful letter to Congress and the President urging them to immediately close the family detention facility in Artesia, New Mexico, where the U.S. currently detains women and children fleeing violence and persecution in Central America. Read More
Inspector General Falls Short in Documenting Border Detention Conditions
The deplorable conditions in U.S. Border Patrol—an agency within U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—detention facilities have been widely documented in numerous media accounts and NGO reports and challenged in federal lawsuits. Immigrant children and other immigrants detained in these facilities—often called “hieleras” or “iceboxes”… Read More
Anti-Immigrant Group Repeatedly Blames Immigrants for Unemployment
According to anti-immigrant groups such as the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), every immigrant worker who enters the U.S. labor force is stealing a job from a native-born worker. In this view of the world, employment is a zero-sum game in which immigrants and the native-born compete for a… Read More
Cities and Regions Explore Ways to Maximize Migration’s Local Dividends
Local officials are recognizing that immigration can play a role in their broader growth and development strategies. As Demetrios Papademetriou of the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) explains, immigration can be an economic windfall for their communities through more jobs and growth. But these benefits are not automatic… Read More
Here Are Some of the Stories of Women Held at Artesia
The lawsuit filed last week by the American Immigration Council, the ACLU, the National Immigration Project, and the National Immigration Law Center challenging government deportation policies at the family detention center in Artesia, New Mexico, has shined a light on the deprivation of due process occurring there daily. Read More
Why Groups Are Suing the Government over Rushed Deportation Process for Mothers and Children
As families from Central America flee violence and persecution to seek refuge in the United States, hundreds of mothers and their children apprehended after crossing the border have been locked up at an isolated detention center in Artesia, New Mexico—hours from the nearest major metropolitan area. Two hundred and… Read More
Texas Governor Invokes Nonsensical Statistics on Immigrant Crime in His State
After more than a century’s worth of studies and reports, you’d think that politicians would have gotten the message: not only are the vast majority of immigrants not criminals, but immigrants are less likely to be criminals than native-born Americans. This is true for both unauthorized immigrants and… Read More
Study: Providing Representation for Indigent Immigrants Could Pay for Itself
U.S. immigration laws provide only minimal due process protections for even the most vulnerable immigrants facing deportation, and in 59 percent of cases, immigrants are forced to navigate the byzantine immigration court system without representation, including many unaccompanied children. Many do not… Read More
New York’s Highest Court Says that Noncitizens Must Be Warned of Deportation Risk Before Pleading Guilty
The highest court in New York ruled on Tuesday that due process compels state court judges to warn defendants in criminal proceedings who are not U.S. citizens that pleading guilty to a felony may result in their deportation. The court noted that “deportation is a plea consequence of such tremendous importance, grave impact and frequent occurrence that a defendant is entitled to notice that it may ensue…Due process compels a trial court to apprise a defendant that, if the defendant is not an American citizen, he or she may be deported as a consequence of a guilty plea to a felony.” Read More
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